Unlock Financial Freedom: Emma Powell’s Real Estate Investment Journey

Dylan Silver (00:01.358)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, I have a passive income expert really from Salt Lake City, Utah, calling in from Alaska, Powell. Emma, welcome to the show.

Emma Powell (00:18.158)
Nice to be here. It’s good to meet you, Dylan. We’ve been talking pre-show, like all sorts of interesting stuff, so it should be good conversation.

Dylan Silver (00:24.598)
Absolutely, you know, before we dive in here, I always like to get folks background how they got into the real estate space. How’d you get into real estate?

Emma Powell (00:35.138)
Really it was to protect ourselves from all the layoffs. My husband was experienced in the IT industry I was a real estate photographer. I did wedding photography on the weekend and I was doing some independent contracting as a marketer for a bunch of different startups and He still even between all that I was homeschooling six kids and it was supposed to be just like a side hustle part-time thing and it was supposed to pay for like family vacations piano lessons things like that and What ended up happening is he got laid off in 2017 and we just felt like a drift and I realized

I had these multiple streams of income going but none of them were really enough to support the family even altogether they weren’t enough to support the family and I told him I said I will never let this happen again. You’re basically the sole provider for six kids and Essentially what amounted to a stay-at-home mom and even though I was working I just didn’t really feel like the work was worth how much time I was taking away from my kids and my mom Did a lot of these little cottage businesses when I was growing up and I felt like it took a lot of time away from the family and she never

Made really any money at all and I felt like that time away was not worth What she was getting paid to take the time away So she she derived a lot of personal fulfillment out of it and for her that was a thing and I just got the point where I was like do I want to do this for my own personal fulfillment or do I want to do this to get paid do I want to take this time away from my children to get paid well so that if my husband ever loses his job I can keep this thing this ship floating for as long as possible and so when we he lost that job in Austin, Texas we live there for

Dylan Silver (01:52.58)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (02:04.758)
years we were in our forever home we had a little ranch like it was was you know we all loved it right but my husband always said Austin never felt like home and so when he got laid off we just cast a wider net we’re willing to move wherever

Dylan Silver (02:09.37)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (02:16.574)
And we started looking into other cities and the recruiter from Salt Lake City just, you know, killed it. And he got set up so many interviews. So we drove up there, did a bunch of interviews. He got a job offer within a couple of days. And we packed up and moved up to Salt Lake City. And so because I had left my photography business behind, I was still doing some online work for some of the startups that I was contracting for. But I really had to reinvent myself and find a new career. And with that new feeling in mind, I would

was like, I better find something that pays really well. And I considered like, do I go back to school and become an engineer? Do I go to medical school? Like, what do I want to do here? And Investor never really kind of came into the picture there, but I did know that there was freedom in having a bunch of rental houses. And so I was like, maybe we should just start down this long road of buying rental houses one by one until we get there. And what I noticed is when I started,

welcoming creative finance into my life. Getting out of like the Dave Ramsey, you have to pay cash mindset and getting more into seller financing and getting mentorship through our local real estate association, buying an online course here and there, things like that. When I became more open to creative financing, I was able to in that very first year buy five houses. And that was going from Austin, where the cost of living is very low. I think we sold our farm. It was five acres right off I-35 for $440,000, I think it was. It was like a three

$3,000 something square foot home and we moved to Utah and we bought a suburban home for like $550 and I was just like this is this is a crazy difference in cost of living. didn’t think there was really problem. Salt Lake was way more expensive and so the gas was more, food was more. We had state income tax for the first time. Like I just I remember telling my husband we were renting when we first got there and I said I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to buy another house again. But because by the time we

Dylan Silver (03:56.666)
It was more expensive there.

Dylan Silver (04:06.095)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (04:13.584)
sold the Texas house and got the actual money in our bank account from the profit that we made because it was a gut remodel. We’d done a lot of work on it, a lot of forced equity into it. We had a good profit on that house. By that time, it had taken a couple of months, I was able to get educated and get into the real estate community. And I was able to say, you know what, I don’t have to put all this money into our personal home. He could afford it off the W-2.

We would lose it if he lost his w2 we’d have to move right, but that was already the case in Texas He lost his w2 and we had we had to move and so I felt like look We’ll just do that. I’m gonna take the rest of this I’m gonna go do some of this creative finance stuff and I’m gonna buy a bunch of rental houses and like I said that first year I was able to buy five rentals before I kind of ran out of money and then by that point I knew a lot of people who were saying you need to raise capital in order to do more and bigger real estate deals because I wanted that security as fast

possible. And it wasn’t like I need the private jet or anything. I just wanted to know that if he got laid off, that we were not at risk. so I was and it was my full time thing. I had left my businesses behind. By that point, I was no longer even contracting online. And so real estate was my full time gig for quite a while. And I had this fire burning into me because in the art in the industry that we work on in, he was an IT like you get laid off a lot. And so I really wanted to be prepared. And and that security really, really motivated me. But after like

Dylan Silver (05:18.702)
you’d have another way.

Emma Powell (05:43.306)
the first two years, especially once I started syndicating commercial properties with investors, I realized like, no, this doesn’t just have the power to protect us from a layoff. Like this could retire us way earlier than we thought. I started when I was 40.

And we had like that chunk of money from our Texas house. So I mean if you want to think about it that way You know, we started with 35 right because the house took some time But so if you say we started with 35 I finally retired him I was 46 and he was 48 and I just had this burning goal to retire us before 50 and the last time he got laid off in 2022 I was like you don’t really have to go back to work. So let’s just retire so that’s basically the timeline the reasoning the timeline and our motivations behind doing what we did

and Real Estate was kind of our ticket out of the rat race.

Dylan Silver (06:31.546)
When I think about IT, I think a lot of people are potentially shocked. I’m not, because I’m actually a student at software engineering boot camp. I think you think most people that STEM is like this impenetrable, you’re never going to lose your job type of thing. And that’s couldn’t be further from the truth, specifically in the last 10 years, because maybe before 10 years ago,

Emma Powell (06:53.88)
No.

Dylan Silver (06:58.574)
There was was very niche. Like there wasn’t a whole lot of exposure even in this still unfortunately happens. A lot of the schools that you would go to wouldn’t even give you the tool set that you need to be successful on the job. You’d have some like high level theory. But right now specifically with AI with the exposure with the world market like IT is not impenetrable. Like you can have seasoned career professionals potentially even in management positions. And they’re like well we actually think

we’re overpaying and we can find the same person elsewhere or we don’t need you any longer. So go figure it out.

Emma Powell (07:33.026)
Yeah.

And that’s what that taught us because when he got laid off in order to, he got a great severance because he was actually going to quit. We were just to the point where like, I think you can quit. And he got laid off like three days after he picked a quitting date. And so we’re like, great. Now we have severance and we have a couple of months to kind of figure out what we’re going to do. We launched a business with some partners. Basically we’re the capital raisers for a hard money business that we run with our partners. And so that gave us the opportunity to say like, hey, we’re going to take the severance. We’re going to take a couple of months. We’re going to go on a sabbatical. We have some things to do, right?

But to get unemployment, he had to keep applying for jobs. And so for that couple of months he was getting unemployment, he was out there, he had to pound the pavement and look for jobs. And he realized like he had his skill set that he had niched into was not as desirable in the wider world. He needed to go back and get some new certifications. He wasn’t really enjoying the work anymore and he couldn’t find a job after hundreds of interviews and applications.

he didn’t have a job offer. And so that was a really eye opening to us. Like if you had been laid off and we really had to do this.

Dylan Silver (08:34.778)
Huge.

What will we do?

Emma Powell (08:39.438)
we’d be in rough shape right now. And so it went from the 2017 layoff being a panic attack to the 2022 layoff being like a victory lap. And that job search during the unemployment phase was the confirmation that we had done what we needed to do. We completely changed everything between 2017 and 2022 so that when that inevitable happened, we weren’t just protected. Now we were winning, we were thriving. And that was such a…

That moment of validation was so powerful for me as like a homeschool mom of six children who, like I said, was raised by a mom who had a zillion little side hustle, little business, cottage businesses to be able to say like, not only made enough money to support the family, I retired my husband 15 plus years early. That’s significant.

Dylan Silver (09:16.655)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:31.928)
That’s a flex. That’s a flex.

Emma Powell (09:33.868)
Yeah, and that boost in confidence that I got from that. Now, I still, struggle with self doubt constantly. Like, what if, what if this all comes unraveled? What if all comes around? I think that that security, because I’m so security minded, because that’s so motivating for me, that’s also my, my greatest fear. Right. And so I still, it’s not like, yeah, I’m walking on water. We’re going to be fine forever. I still am aware and hungry and fighting every single day to make sure that this golden goose keeps on laying.

Dylan Silver (10:03.01)
One of the things you you talk about real estate being a way to have security and to not be dependent on a W-2. I think personally that that anybody who’s in in IT really any profession period but specifically IT should be looking at real estate or at least have an eye on it.

Because if you don’t and these things happen, then you have to kind of figure it out on the fly. But you’re making enough money in most cases where if you’re not putting it into real estate, you’re either going to be putting into the market or you’re going to be buying a bunch of stuff materialistically that you may or may not need as kind of we fall into these habits. And so

Emma Powell (10:33.014)
Yes.

Emma Powell (10:47.626)
Mm-hmm. And if you’re not having that fire lit under you or the deadline or whatever, then that’s the thing. But because I had kind of this fake deadline in my head of the next time he gets laid off, I didn’t know exactly when that was going to be, but I knew it would happen again. And indeed it did, because in this industry, it’s not if, it’s when, right? So that kind of even amorphous deadline really motivated me. And he didn’t have to be motivated. We were in a partnership, right? So he did his thing. He went to work. He did his W-2.

Dylan Silver (10:52.846)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (11:17.54)
kept the lights on, he paid the mortgage on a stable house for the kids to enjoy, and then I went and did my thing on the side and I was driven and committed to it because what had happened to us created that fire burning under us. And so the people who are complacent and they’re not really working toward anything, maybe after the first layoff you might, well, we found another good job, right? But after the second, third layoff, like…

Dylan Silver (11:20.59)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (11:39.866)
It’s like what in the world?

Emma Powell (11:40.386)
That security is gone and you better figure something out. And so we did have a fire burning under us that was very motivating.

Dylan Silver (11:47.192)
Now, I want to pivot a bit here and talk about passive income and then also living a semi remote lifestyle. You’ve traveled quite a bit before hopping on here. We’ve mentioned some of the places you’ve been Eastern Europe, Hawaii, you’re in Alaska right now. I’m jealous. We you know, there’s there’s multiple different ways that people can live. We talked a little bit about how you could really dive into one home base and make that

Emma Powell (12:06.871)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:17.42)
your world, then also someone like myself just really, really likes to travel and to experience new things. So in your experience, has that been intentional? Have you been intentional with saying, we’re going to try different places? And then how did you make that a reality?

Emma Powell (12:39.554)
With anything, it’s just like how I learned real estate. I joined some local clubs, I took a few online courses, I had some social media groups, I just made sure that I spent time with people who were doing the thing that I wanted to be doing. And that was coming from, let’s say, homeschooling from years before. When you first start homeschooling, you’re like, I don’t know what I’m doing, right? So you just connect with a tribe of people who are already doing it successfully. And then I zeroed into a particular niche of style of homeschooling we wanted to do, and then I started hanging out with those specialty niche groups.

people around us would be like, homeschooling so risky, you’re going to screw up your kids, right? Especially when we kind of blew away the structure and started doing something called unschooling. People were very worried. They’re like, you’re not even doing books. You’re not even making them do math. But what about math? And my daughter just graduated from mechanical engineering school. So it’s going to be fine. Math is going to be fine. And so I felt like hanging out with other people who are farther ahead on that journey was how we learned what we were doing. And so we shifted over to a group called the world schoolers, and they basically will unschool their kids while they’re traveling. And so they’re

giving their kids rich experiences so that when they’re ready for career type of academics, when they’re a little bit older, they’re ready to start going to community college, they’ve identified some sort of career path, and then you can just lead them into that. But because they have so many experiences to hang each lesson on, it’s like they’re learning about something in a physics class, and they’re like, yeah, that’s like that wave pool that we went to at that really cool resort in Mexico. You know, those types of things come into play, and that’s how you educate. And so I felt very secure and very clear on our goals with our kids’ educational

And so the world schooling it was just a matter of hanging out with other people who are doing it The biggest problem with world schooling was how do you pay for it? How do you not have a job? How do you travel the world? How do you how do you pay for that? And so watching their career choices and how they were able to finance that was very very interesting and I saw a huge proportion of rental home owners like much higher than the general population online remote work Entrepreneurship these types of things and that really taught us to figure out how to do this and my mom was raised

in the Air Force. And so she was in many, many different states and several foreign countries. And she had a lack of a home base and a place where she was from and kind of the strange accent from living in foreign countries with American parents. And so she really wanted to dig into a community as a young married person. And we never went anywhere, did anything, moved, not even a lot of vacations. Right. And so that was very frustrating for me growing up because she really craved that connection to community. And what the world schoolers taught us is like, you

Dylan Silver (14:46.959)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (15:09.114)
need a home base. You need a house that you can go back to even it’s just your parents house, right? You need a safe place to go where you’re returning year after year, season after season where they say I’m from this place. And so that’s why we kind of picked Salt Lake City as our home base and why we’re so intentional about it is because our kids really like it. Our adult kids are building careers there. It just makes sense. And so we just say we’re from Salt Lake City and we keep going back there again and again. But over the last three years, we probably spent eight months in Salt Lake City, but they still

Dylan Silver (15:14.415)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (15:38.976)
consider themselves from there. We own property. That’s where the older siblings live. So that’s kind of the secret is digging into a community and keep coming back to it. It doesn’t have to be your full-time community. And then also just figuring out how to pay for this lifestyle without being tied to a particular work location and being able to find meaningful work wherever you go. Sometimes that’s remote online. What we’re doing right now is a local seasonal job that’s completely non-real estate related. And it’s just like this breath of fresh air. Like last, I think it was last

Dylan Silver (15:40.035)
on this.

Emma Powell (16:08.88)
year when we were back in Salt Lake City, I was trying to help my daughter start a piano lessons business and they were like, I was like, let me show you how it’s done. Right. And so I figured I’ll get a couple of piano students and I’ll be able to turn those over to my daughters when we leave again. And so I just put out the ads and things, got a couple of students, but I ended up not turning them over to my daughters because I was having so much fun doing something completely non real estate related. And when we got into the piano lesson, they were just hand me money, which is so different than investing when you might get paid someday down the line. And I was like, I really miss just doing something. And then somebody give me

Dylan Silver (16:28.858)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (16:38.8)
me money for it. But I have the freedom to be able to embrace both. Most of our income, a good solid portion of it comes from passive income and investments and things like that. But then we run this capital raising business where we help investors place their money passively, where we get paid a little bit on owner distributions. And then we get paid a little bit from some fun side hustles that are completely, completely different than anything we’ve ever done. And that has been an eye opening experience that multiple streams of income can be related or not related.

Dylan Silver (16:59.939)
unrelated.

Emma Powell (17:08.72)
that’s really what has fueled this for us, that we know wherever we go, we can find meaningful ways to spend our time and that we can afford it. Not in the lap of luxury. I don’t want to make it sound like you don’t still have to be conscious and even to a certain point frugal, right? But at the same time, it’s a trade-off that you make for a lifestyle that is of your own making and your own design. And we’re creatively executing how we’re getting that done.

Dylan Silver (17:37.23)
You know, when I think of businesses where you’re paying cash, the first thing that comes to mind for me is like when I go get my hair cut. And every time I kind of have this thought, like, actually, like, this is kind of an interesting thing. Like, I wonder how much barbers make. And I’m thinking like, well, who owns this place and how do they make money? And are they charging per chair or are these people on a salad? Like, how does this work? And there’s really not too many other things that are like that. And of course,

Emma Powell (17:44.716)
Yeah.

Emma Powell (17:57.197)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (18:04.196)
you owning restaurants isn’t easy. that’s a cash business, owning restaurants is difficult. But then you have some of these other things like, you know, car wash. I feel like we’re seeing car washes all over the place and there’s a new high tech car wash everywhere. And so some of these cash heavy businesses are really attractive. And of course, real estate people are buying businesses. So there’s a lot of a lot of overlap there, actually.

Emma Powell (18:27.34)
I do like the closed ended nature of what we’re doing because I feel like the capital raising business that’s open ended. We’re going to be doing that for many years to come. And so having some closed ended stuff, like I will teach piano lessons for the next six months while we’re in Utah, or I will. We’re working in the tourism industry right now, the cruise ship industry right now in Alaska, and that’s going to last for six months and then we’re done. And we can choose to go back to Salt Lake. We can choose to go somewhere else. But the fact is, humans live in a seasonal way.

And the circadian rhythms, you know this from sleep hacking, that those rhythms and that is so important to our health. so having this kind of open ended thing where I just go to this office every day for years and years and years, even in high school, even though they’re going to a box every single day, the same location, spending hours and hours a day in this very small footprint, they know at the end of 12th grade, they’re moving on. And as adults and corporate, especially, we don’t have that feeling of saying, like, I know what’s coming next. And so what ends up happening is when you retire early and you find

kind of figure out the income part of it. You go through this desert period of like, I don’t know where to go or what to do with myself. So I am really enjoying the closed-ended nature of work that has a final point. It’s not just a business I have to run forever or a job I have to do forever. It’s like, I’m going to do this thing for this period of time and then I’m going to move on. And that really feeds the biological need of a human to be seasonal and cycling through different things.

Dylan Silver (19:55.418)
hacking that can be just as important as the part beforehand, right? We don’t think about it until we get there sometimes. Emma, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to learn more about what you’re doing or maybe get in touch with you?

Emma Powell (19:59.874)
Yep.

Emma Powell (20:09.71)
Yeah.

Go to investwithemma.com. It’s the easiest way to get a time on my calendar and just talk. If you’re an investor and you want to passively invest with us, like that would be somebody that would love to talk to you and get you involved in our investor portal. Look at the deals that we have. You can kind of pick and choose between them. You don’t have to invest in everything that we do. But it’s one of those things where we can get you on the path to making some passive income and then introduce you into the world of private investing where there are many, many other people and ways that you can diversify putting your money in, just making those introductions.

I think is very important to me. And I think it’s also really important. I want to be that person in passive income, like what we found in the homeschooling community, what we found in the real estate community, where it’s I want to show people this is what I’m doing, this is what’s working for us, and I want to be part of that journey for the listener to say, like, I want to retire early, even if you choose to keep working, it doesn’t matter, you could retire early if you needed to. I want to be that person in that community of passive income.

early retired people that you can have an actual case study of people who are really doing this. All of my partners are already retired on passive income. And so I feel like we’re not just selling this dream to try and get investors into our portal. Like we’re actually doing it. And we are really enjoying creating that community and that sounding board for our investors to say like, all right, how do I do this? And here we are doing it together.

Dylan Silver (21:34.399)
Thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Emma Powell (21:37.74)
Yeah, thank you so much, Dylan. Always a fun conversation. Love talking about this stuff.